Last week, while Sean Combs (street names: Puff Daddy, P. Diddy) filled in for Regis Philbin on ABC’s “Live! With Regis and Kelly,” police and school officials in the Central New Jersey town of Sayreville were in the process of postponing the annual Sayreville H.S. homecoming football game, fearing that it would serve as a staging ground for a violent showdown between Bloods and Crips.

The game would be moved from a Friday night to a Monday afternoon. Interesting, too, is how New Yorkers make poke fun at New Jersey, as if its inhabitants suffer from culture lag, as if they don’t quite get it. Well, I live in Jersey – Central New Jersey, to be more specific – and let me tell ya, everything’s up to date.

The number of Bloods and Crips enrolled in Sayreville High, according to the local paper, The Home News, is on the rise, plus word had been passed to the police that gang reinforcements would be heading down from Newark to take in the South Brunswick-Sayreville game.

On a “good” football day in Sayreville, a decidedly middleclass/working-class community, a relative fortune in taxpayer funds is spent staffing football games, with no fewer than eight police on the scene. Among other things, a gang war at Sayreville’s homecoming football game would have been unaffordable.

Davon Clark, recruited to play football in Central New Jersey – at Rutgers University in New Brunswick – is currently awaiting trial. In May, he was charged with murder in a Bloods vs. Crips rubout. He’s also charged with endangering

a minor, having had a “relationship” with a 15-year-old girl.

Two weeks ago, NJ issued its report on the 2003 crime season, noting that while overall crime is slightly down, the murder rate hit its highest point in nine years. Peter Harvey, NJ’s Attorney General, blamed this on an increase in gang numbers and gang activities.

And so, last week, as we watched P. Diddy sub for Philbin, it was hardly lost on us this Central New Jersey resident that Combs’ celebrated presence – his fame and fortune – is rooted in his longtime standing as perhaps this country’s greatest commercial exploiter and purveyor of America’s epidemic gang culture. Combs is one-stop shopping bad news, from backing the unprintably hateful, violent and vulgar “artistry” of gangsta rappers (consult the Internet for lyrics), to a public life that has been accompanied by bulleted street hassles, including the murders of several of his closest business associates and rivals.

He isn’t merely a negative influence on society, his stock-in-trade is black self-enslavement. He has grown fabulously wealthy advancing and cementing the worst stereotypes of young black men – that they are “niggas” who should aspire to nothing more than a life (and death) of crime, that they should treat women as “bitches” and

“hos” who should be sexually used, abused, then discarded, and that one’s social status should be measured in gold and silver.

And yet, he’s chosen to co-host “Regis and Kelly.” He’s chosen by the City of New York to carry the Olympic torch. He’s embraced by Al Sharpton, who claims, with the media’s indulgence, to represent the best interests of African-Americans.

That Combs has become a mainstream star is not merely a case of extreme pandering, it’s a crime against society.

The country is being laid low by gangs and gangsta wannabes and gangsta worshippers, and we’ve made a champ out of one of the greatest purveyors – war profiteers – of Gangsta America. It’s reap-what-we-sow and Combs is among our grimmest reapers.

Michael Damico, the attorney representing Davon Clark, the Rutgers player who has been charged in a Bloods vs. Crips murder, told NJ’s Star-Ledger that his client may have been “desensitized, to a certain point,” by growing up surrounded by bad influences. Imagine that.